Big Ben chimes at the start of the 6 o’clock news. You turn off the radio, put down your file, remove the stub of pencil from behind your ear, rouse the Jack Russell from his bed, glance at your ‘Oscar’ from the Bespoked Awards, and lock up.
It’s the end of another fulfilling day spent crafting unique, exquisitely finished bike frames for discerning customers. You sling your leg over the top tube and pedal home. Life has never been so good…
Or maybe… you wake in a cold sweat. The order book is bare, the landlord wants the rent for your workshop, and your one client spends an hour a day on the phone changing the details of the frame he’s commissioned.
Your legs ache from countless hours on your feet, and if you do manage to find a few moments in your day to escape the brazing torch, you spend it stuck behind a laptop answering emails and driving your social media in the desperate hope of securing another order. But which of those two scenarios is closer to the reality of life as a custom framebuilder?
Cooking up a career
Matthew Sowter was working as a chef when he decided to change direction and pursue his dream of becoming a framebuilder. Already a keen cyclist, the opportunity to mix business with pleasure proved irresistible.
‘I’d reached a turning point in my life where I was unsatisfied with my daily routine, so I decided to bring my love of bicycles to the forefront and get my hands dirty by creating a tangible object,’ says Sowter. He enrolled at technical college to learn how to weld, then got a job at Enigma Bicycle Works welding steel frames. He stayed for two years, ‘making mistakes on someone else’s time’, before going it alone and establishing Saffron Frameworks.
Sowter swiftly discovered that his new job involved a lot more than a workbench and tools. ‘In a six-day week I was spending four days a week doing business stuff, and a very small amount of time doing framebuilding,’ he recalls. With the order book healthy, he now employs an assistant, Andy Matthews, to help with the administration.
‘I was surprised when I started how much work there was for me,’ says Matthews. ‘I was doing six or seven-day weeks and working late, until we put a few systems into place. Now I’ve managed to cut back to four days a week.’
It’s a sobering reminder of the time demanded by the dull but vital side of running a small business. Nor is it an easy life in the workshop. ‘It’s hard graft and long hours,’ says Sowter. ‘I start at 7.30am and finish anywhere between 6 and 8pm. I try to restrict that to five days a week, but I end up working one or two Saturdays. There have been times when I have worked every day for a month, sometimes doing 16 to 18 hours a day. Physically it’s tough – I’ve spent most of my working life on my feet.’
Oh, and then there’s the money. Having swapped braising for brazing, Sowter earns ‘a hell of a lot less than at my last job as a chef’, and his kitchen work came with a guaranteed salary. ‘This is a very difficult industry to be self-employed in. The financial reward is pretty low.’
If this all sounds like a cue for the string section to start tuning up, there’s unfettered enthusiasm in Sowter’s voice as he describes the upsides of his new career. ‘What I’ve found really enjoyable is the interaction with the rider and going through the process with them,’ he says. ‘The majority ride off on a bike that they have put something into and that gives them a lot of joy, and it’s great to be making something that someone really wants.’
Crime pays
It was a robbery that spurred Caren Hartley into building bikes. She’d been making a living as a jeweller and large-scale metal sculptor, but had become jaded by the art world. Rather than working on her career, she was avoiding it by spending as much time as possible on her bike. ‘I wanted a change, but I still wanted to make things,’ she says. ‘Then I found out that people were still making bikes in the UK.’
She started by helping out in the workshop shared by Sowter and Jake Rusby, of Rusby Cycles, to learn skills and see if it was work she would like. Her path into framebuilding as a living, however, sprang from an unlikely source. ‘I had been talking about helping Matt and Jake when a good friend had her bike stolen. She had the money for a new one, said, ‘I believe in you,’ and paid for me to go on a framebuilding course at The Bicycle Academy.’
Six months later she secured her first commission. The world of framebuilding, however, has not turned out to be a promised land of milk and honey. In return for a 60-plus hour week and a steady supply of orders, she candidly suggests an annual salary of about £20,000 is achievable.
‘I live on a boat, which I own, and live quite frugally, so nearly everything I have earned from the business I’ve been able to reinvest in tools,’ says Hartley. ‘I had quite a lot of workshop tools already, but then I spent about £1,000 straight away to have the right files, build a bench and so on. To make a bike quickly you need quite a lot of tools and they cost a lot of money. Plus, in London, having the space to do this is one of the biggest expenses.’
Nor has she found any shortcuts in creating a bespoke bike: ‘It takes such a long time to make a frame – about 80 hours – and trying to charge for that time is quite difficult.’
On the upside, her fears that making the same thing over and over would be boring have proved unfounded. Her custom builds keep commissions fresh, and she finds genuine enjoyment in the process of trying to make each frame different while developing a signature style.
‘It’s also nice that bikes are objects that are used, that people go out and ride them and have a relationship with them,’ she says.
The second coming
‘When we started in the 1980s there were 200-plus frame builders in Britain,’ says Rob Wade, who has worked on and off for Swallow Bikes since 1983. ‘If you wanted a decent bike in those days, you had it built. By 2004 there were fewer than 10 framebuilders.’ His experience reveals how difficult it can be to keep a business in the black.
Wade remembers the bottom falling out of the hand-built frame market in the 1990s, forcing him and his business partner Peter Bird to find other jobs in the bike industry. They only resumed manufacturing in 2012, this time as part of a larger retail business, which also sells mass-produced bikes and delivers framebuilding courses.
‘To make it as a framebuilder you need to build about 30 bikes a year, at an average selling price of £4,000,’ says Wade. ‘That will give you a turnover of £120,000. Take out renting a small workshop for £500 a month, all your raw materials, plus heating, lighting and other overheads, and that leaves just about enough to take out a living wage.’
He’s delighted to see the resurrection of bespoke bike building, but draws a clear distinction between those who have done the hard yards learning and polishing their skills and newcomers who do a week-long course and call themselves framebuilders.
‘There are a lot of people who will make a very pretty frame and post it on Instagram, but it takes you six to 12 frames to learn how to build, and then you spend the rest of your life honing the skill,’ says Wade. ‘We will do our utmost to help framebuilders who are doing it as a proper commercial venture, but the people who are dabbling at it have to wise up to the fact that the business is hard, it’s long hours, and it’s not much money.’
First birthday bikes
Basking under the halo of three Bespoked 2016 awards, Quirk Cycles is only a year old. Rob Quirk was working as an artist when he took the plunge into framebuilding.
‘I’d been wanting to do a framebuilding course for quite a while, and had invested a lot of energy into designing a UK-manufactured carbon monocoque frame, which was eventually shelved,’ he says. ‘At the time I had a Cervélo R3, and I thought that would be the bike, but it wasn’t, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was missing. So I ended up selling it and with the money I went on a framebuilding course at The Bicycle Academy, because steel as a material offered an immediacy of production and set-up that carbon didn’t. After riding my first frame, I never looked back.’
A combination of savings and start-up funding from the Government helped him get the business off the ground, but it took six months to find a workshop in London. Building Bloqs is a ‘pay as you go’ workshop, a large, shared space, which spared Quirk the need to invest in machinery, gases, lathes and a paint booth. Even his jig is borrowed.
Sharing the workshop with blacksmiths and metal fabricators presents a valuable opportunity to share skills, but marketing is as important as manufacturing. Quirk is building awareness via Team Quirk – himself plus a pair of sponsored riders who race on Quirk bikes. Their success and social media activity has helped to bring in orders.
‘One of the hardest things is not knowing when your next deposit and order will come in,’ he says. ‘You have to make these bikes objects of desire. You do try to offer details that make a frame more special, but the client is also investing in you as a person as much as they are buying a frame.’
The launch pad
Quirk’s alma mater, The Bike Academy in Frome, Somerset, is only four years old, but has already established a glowing reputation. Since inception, one of its former students has won Best New Builder at Bespoked every year, and in 2016 its alumni picked up 20 awards. The company was set up by design engineer Andrew Denham, who had become disillusioned with his work in the aerospace and off-shore oil and gas industries. He was also distinctly unimpressed with the framebuilding courses available at the time.
‘I found it thoroughly disengaging because people were saying, “You can build a bike, but only if it’s like this,”’ he recalls. ‘And, “We can’t really teach you, but you can have a hand in doing it,” or, “This bit we can’t teach you because it’s too difficult.” Getting people to copy you isn’t teaching – it’s monkey-see, monkey-do at best. If instruction and teaching are the same, people who buy Ikea furniture could consider themselves to be furniture makers.’
Raising £40,000 in six days through crowd-funding, he set up The Bicycle Academy in 2012, with a mission to transform the way the trade is taught. He employed a framebuilder to teach him, and then deconstructed the various processes involved in building a bike so he could piece them back together and pass on those skills. More than 500 students have now passed through The Academy’s doors, giving Denham an insight into the growing interest in hand-built frames.
‘When they reach their mid-twenties, people don’t feel their life is as nourishing as they thought it would be. It’s a quarter-life crisis. There are many jobs in which people do not engage in anything that feels tangible. So they want to carve a spoon, bake bread… or make a bike,’ he says.
Turning this into a career, however, is infernally difficult, and Denham is planning to expand the courses offered by The Bicycle Academy to include modules on how to run a small business. ‘Within framebuilding there’s a sense that making money is bad, but validity is not through hardship – it’s through the quality of workmanship,’ he says. ‘Being poor doesn’t make you a better framebuilder.
‘Being commercially capable is down to your ability to run a business, to market yourself, manage stock, deal with overheads, plan cashflow and so on,’ he adds. ‘None of these things are insurmountable, but being sufficiently good at all of them concurrently is very challenging.’
It all comes together
Tom Donhou picks up the phone at his Donhou Bicycles workshop in Hackney Wick, London, and in the background his cocker spaniel, Meli, barks. He really does have a dog at work, a pet who runs alongside him as he pedals through the Olympic park on his commute. With a 10-month lead time on new orders, has Cyclist finally found the framebuilder who truly lives the dream?
Donhou’s eureka moment occurred at the far end of the Gobi Desert, during a nine-month solo cycling expedition. The solitude of the adventure afforded him countless hours to reimagine the bike he was riding, and he realised that the only way for his perfect frame to become a reality would be to make it himself.
Years later, his dream bike is still on the backburner, delayed by demand for his drool-inducing custom builds. He’s one of the few framebuilders who has scaled up his business, albeit modestly, by launching a range of stock frames, called Signature Steel. Sales of Donhou bespoke bikes still outnumber the stock frames two-to-one, and his fingerprints (wiped clean, naturally) are all over every frame that leaves the shop.
‘I’ve gone from working 24/7 to coming in at 9 o’clock and going home at 7.30pm, and I’ve stopped myself working at weekends now,’ he says. ‘But there are still only two of us building frames, and my hands still touch every process of the build. It’s still me doing the bulk of the work.
‘People come to you because they’re after your level of perfectionism and finish, and it’s difficult to scale that. You can’t clone yourself. I’m trying to develop another model in the Signature Steel range, but that has to fit around the custom builds in the workshop.’
Formerly a product designer creating everything from toys to perfume bottles, Donhou has few regrets about his change in career.
‘It would be nice to grow a little bigger, work normal hours and have a decent wage, and it sucks that I don’t get to ride as much as I want,’ he says. ‘Framebuilding will make you rich in the heart and poor in the pocket.’
Hartley Cycles Pocket Rocket
This eye-catching bike is designed around a 650c wheelset for a shorter rider. The smaller wheelset allows the entire frame to be scaled down, ensuring a better-handling bike, a saddle-to-handlebar drop that allows for a more confortable position, and aesthetically keeping everything in proportion. hartleycycles.com
Swallow Bespoke
There’s a mix of the traditional and state-of-the-art in this custom-made frame, with steel tubes, beautiful finishing touches, ENVE carbon bars and Campagnolo EPS electric gears. bicycles-by-design.co.uk
Saffron Frameworks Ian’s XCR Seascape
A mesmerising paint scheme of gulls, based on the client’s favourite album cover, finishes this staggeringly beautiful bike. It’s made from Columbus XCr stainless steel, mirror-polished to shine through the layers of paint as birds in flight. The bike won the Outstanding Design Award at Bespoked 2016. saffronframeworks.com
Donhou Dazzle
"The idea behind dazzle is that it breaks up the lines of the ship so that an enemy couldn’t focus or gauge speed and distance while sighting their gun. Taking this concept and applying it to a bicycle frame, we worked up the exploded check pattern to confuse the eye.
The paint design includes some exposed areas of stainless steel and fillet brazing, allowing the craftsmanship underneath to come through also." - Tom Donhou. donhoubicycles.com
Learn the ropes
Where can you find inspiration and instruction in the art of framebuilding?
The Bicycle Academy - Frome, Somerset
A seven-day course in which you will build a bike and learn the skills to make frames on your own. The Academy has spawned several award-winning framebuilders. thebicycleacademy.org
Bicycles By Design - Coalport, Shropshire
A week’s one-on-one tuition designing then building your own frame, with two of the most experienced frame builders in the country.
bicycles-by-design.co.uk
Dave Yates Cycles - Coningsby, Lincolnshire
A veteran of almost 12,000 frames, Dave has been teaching for a decade. daveyatescycles.co.uk
Enigma Frame Building Academy - Hailsham, East Sussex
The home of highly desirable steel and titanium bikes has its own academy where a five-day course will see you design and build your own frame. enigmabikes.com
Downland Cycles - Canterbury, Kent
Join a six, eight or 11-day course, stay on site in a bunkhouse (£42 full board) and finish with your very own fillet brazed or lugged frame. downlandcycles.co.uk
Bespoked - Bristol
Chat to framebuilders and get a closer look at their creations at the Bespoked UK Handmade Bicycle Show in Bristol. The next event takes place 7th-9th April 2017. bespoked.cc
The North American Handmade Bicycle Show - Utah, US
Hop over to Utah for arguably the world’s leading handmade bike show from 10th-12th March next year. handmadebicycleshow.com